Posts Tagged ‘cabaret’

Omega Race is an amazing game, with beautiful front artwork covered in zooming space ships, a smooth metal spinner, and a black light scene that gives the illusion of flying your vector ship through space. Sadly, its a game I never got to play back in the arcades of the 1980’s, I don’t recall ever seeing it. Having gone to many of the classic Chicago arcades, I’m sure I would have remembered such a game. Space ships were the big thing thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, and the opportunity to blast my way through enemy ships would have attracted a few of my tokens, no doubt about it.

While Omega Race may be a simple black and white vector game, it has style like some of the great Midway electro-mechanical games with just a hint of the video craze that was about to explode on the scene. Midway designers did a great job incorporating beautiful graphics with engaging game play creating a true classic. While I had played Omega Race a few times during my early collecting years, it wasn’t until I spent a lot of time playing one at Greg’s Freecade back in 2010 that I fell in love. I have a passion for the black and white games because manufacturers typically spent time on the whole game package; game play, sounds, background, bezel, and cabinet artwork. They had to make the game attractive and enticing to get you to try it and then exciting enough to keep those tokens flowing. Omega Race is just such a game and I want to own one. Insert token to continue…

Recently there was some drama on the arcade forums about a “warehouse” raid that was going to happen in Louisville, KY. Brent, a friend of the Operator and an avid arcade collector, was organizing a clean out of this 100,000 square foot, 120 year old school house. The school was closed down in the 1970’s and sometime afterward it was purchased by the Operator who used it primarily as storage for his thriving business. It turned into a bit of a mad house on the forums, but Brent handled the chaos like a pro and everything went smoothly. I planned to head down to check it out with my friend and fellow enthusiast, Jeff Rothe of rotheblog. Luckily, Jeff had organized our purchase from the space long before the sale announcement, so our games were secure. Our primary goal was to secure the games and just check out the space. I loaded up the kids Friday afternoon and headed to Indianapolis for the first leg of the trip, the next morning we would drive up to Louisville for a 9am meeting and planning session with Brent. We were going a little early to help out with the sale, which started at 10am. The trip was about 5hrs and 15min one way. Unless you drive fast 🙂

We woke up Saturday morning to some wet snow, but still decided to take Jeff’s mini van instead of my SUV, it had more space. My youngest would stay with Jeff’s family and visit the Indy zoo, while I took my oldest along for the ride. Never too early to infect him with the collecting bug and I hoped he would enjoy the experience. The ride was easy and the school wasn’t that hard to find. It was huge and it was red. Insert token to continue…

CoinOpSpace is running an arcade game restoration contest with prizes from some of the best vendors in the business, so I’m motivated to dust off those long neglected projects and get moving on the restorations! My first entry into the contest will be my Wizard of Wor mini’s. Yep, two of them.

To learn more about the contest or even to submit your own entry, visit CoinOpSpace. To follow my Wizard of Wor restoration progress, you can check out my WoW blog on COSP. I hope to have both machines up and running very soon.

This restoration has been a serious pain in the butt. I ruined one of my carefully laminated side panels in my last effort, (See part two for that story.) and would need to make another panel. I had enough scrap material to join and make a new panel, so I gave it a try. It worked out well and I figured that after laminating it, you’d never know it was two pieces. Unfortunately during the sizing portion, I cut about 4″ more off the bottom than I should have. Measure twice, cut once, words to live by. I bit the bullet and purchased another piece of material. This time I got it right.

I carefully lined up the new, pre-cut blank on top of the other blank I had already laminated but not cut. I then used screws through the carriage bolt holes to secure the pieces in place. No movement this time. (more…)

I got an opportunity to trade my project centipede cabaret for a project phoenix cabaret. Now you might be saying that I got a crappy deal, but I had very little into the centipede as it was from a bulk buy, I already have a multipede in a millipede cab and phoenix was one of the first games I played as a kid. (more…)